One whole afternoon, Franz and his protégé Winfred sat on freshly hewn tree stumps, and broodedtogether over the great five-hundred-year-old holy tree leaning over Franz’s boyhood home. He’d come to love that huge black sage tree like a grand old uncle who’d grown ever more crusty and mellow with age. But the tree’s gnarled roots had punctured the main sewage pipes of the town, then tore wide cracks across the road like an earthquake. So despite protests of nearby

home owners, the city fathers voted to cut her down in just three days. Chagrined Franzwept at the prospect, and regaled Winfred with tales of family nurtured by the lordly tree. His young friend promised he would muster a series of paintings to honor the blessed tree’s spirit—to that end, he mused upon its densely outblown expanse of limbs and branches. He stayed and stayed, long after Franz retired for bed, holding steady In his brooding eye sharp images

of the tree by twilight, fullmoon light, starlight, and morning sun. Then he caught and heldvivid moments of the wind-blown tree in sudden gusts, wet tree drenched with five-minute downpours of rain, calm tree in dry still hours. His sketchbook in hand, he was growing familiar with the tree’s wide mood swings. Her gaiety. Her sulkiness. Her cringing at putrid smokes and whirling gas fumes from too many passing cars. Her welcome embrace of whole schools of nesting birds—

she loved nothing better than to be weighed down by great scads of birthing gulls. In the last hoursbefore the chain saws came to gnaw and slice through her centuries-thick tiers and layers of rings, he savored her fulsome girth, from bark to bole… The night after she was razed to a wide low stump, Winfred dreamed that he sleeps beside the fallen tree and awakes to find the long zipper running across his abdomen has burst open, releasing a stream of twenty-two butterflies

(varicolored, and of many wing designs) from the long slit in his belly. In the wild dreamhe struggles to pull the flaps of his gaping wound back together, but whenever he tugs those flaps of flesh, they pop open at the other end. Or if he holds both ends, the middle splits— and there’s no stopping the steady migration of the butterflies from his innards out into the pasture… Springing awake, he rises without any pause from bed to his easle, and paints

his own figure leaning against the black sage tree’s trunk, while a spiraling long chainof butterflies winds around man and tree circling upwards ,twenty-two in number as in his dream, ranging in size from tiny moth shapes near the man’s waist to great Monarch butterflies large as grackles, gliding high into uppermost branches. All colors of Winfred’s personality group and regroup in the rainbow palette of wing patterns, no two alike…

It rained all night. By daybreak, the sun peeked between storm banks of cloud, and Winfred plunged into a second tree canvas, an exercise in perspective. A tall man, at far right, studies the black sage tree across the meadow. Day overcast. Storm thunderheads spreading over the middle upper rim. Brain rays are lines diverging from his eyes to the tree’s widely branching puffed-out top. A deluge of light—as if sourceless—comes roaring out from behind the tree

like waves of a flash flood, spewn forth from an unseen backdrop. But waves of light—notwater—engulf the trunk and lower limbs, so blindingly sharp despite the tree’s blocking any direct view of the original beams, the man must squint and shade his eyes with hand visor cupped over his brow to survey the gleamy expanse. SALTA, this super- charged light is called. He’d heard old tales about its inundations from the family elders, but now

encounters it for the first time pristinely. He holds his stance, but shudders in place, rockingwith the heaves of brightness—a glare that whips the viewer in the cheeks and forehead, shakes him from the roots of his hair to the pads of his toes. He is tough, a strong bold witness. He looks back at the light, unflinching. Never averts his eyes. It is a glory to him to have come upon this fierce gush and dazzle, at last. This holy blaze! Famed light of his ancestors…

Laurence Lieberman's recent poems have appeared in Five Points, Southern Review, Colorado Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry and three books of literary criticism.